Image mosaicing involves stitching together multiple separate sets of image information to create a composite still image. In particular, image mosaicing involves stitching together frames of digital image information that are captured by digital still cameras or digital video cameras. Image mosaicing is often utilized to generate a single panoramic image from a series of individual images.
The process of generating a high-quality image mosaic requires large digital storage and processing capacity. In order to provide the storage and processing capacity needed to create a high-quality image mosaic, a still or video digital camera can be connected to a computer equipped with an image mosaicing application. Image information captured by the digital camera is provided directly from the digital camera to the computer and stitched together by the mosaicing application into an image mosaic. The image mosaic generated by the computer can be viewed on a display, printed, edited, and/or permanently stored.
Prior art collection of mosaic images, covering an area larger than a single field of view during remote sensing, records the time of the image snap shot at the instance the command to capture the image is issued and processed by the imaging computer. This time stamp information is typically stored in a database or encoded in the image meta-data (file record) after the image is transferred to the imaging computer or transferred to file storage.
In a situation where a large area image is a mosaic of images collected at different instances of time and collected from different platforms, such as a constellation of remote sensing satellites, precise time information is compromised by the latency occurring among the different satellites or platforms. There may be variable time delays between the expose command and the actual time an image snap-shot begins and ends. This makes processing and analysis, which are critically dependent on the time each mosaic tile image is captured, very difficult. For example, tracking movement of an object through a large mosaic, requires a large amount of processing power and storage capacity, because of latency considerations between mosaic tile images.
The present invention overcomes time issues due to imprecise time stamping of mosaic tiles, imprecise differences in image exposures between mosaic tiles, and imprecise differences in processing speeds between one tile and another tile.